Friday, May 18, 2018

Viktor Ullmann, A Life Composed of Dissonance

Photo of the Day

Viktor Ullman [born in 1888 in Teschen, now Cieszyn, Poland–died in Auschwitz in 1944] shown here in this undated photo, perhaps from the late 1920s, but undoubtedly in better times. In an excellent article for the Orel Foundation, Gwyneth Bravo writes:“Prior to his death in 1944, he wrote that ‘[artistic] form’ must be understood from the perspective of Goethe and Schiller as that which ‘overcomes matter or substance [and where] the secret of every work of art is the annihilation of matter through form—something that can possibly be seen as the overall mission of the human being, not only the aesthetic but ethical human being as well.’” His life was marked by dissonance, the last few years only more so, but what he did with this material, chiefly what resided in his brain and his heart, is remarkable. One site dedicated to Viktor Ullmann writes: “Viktor Ullmann was transported to Terezín on 8 September 1942. In the squalor of the ghetto he organised lectures, wrote critiques, performed as a pianist, and continued to compose. He created more than twenty works in captivity, including three piano sonatas, songs and choruses, the melodrama The Song of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke based on the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, and the opera The Emperor of Atlantis, which he did not have time to stage (it was first performed in altered form in 1975, in its original form in 1992). On 16 October 1944 he found himself bound for Auschwitz in a transport which included the conductors Rafael Schächter and Karel Ančerl, the actor Gustav Schorch, composers Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Gideon Klein, the poet and painter Petr Kien (the librettist of Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis), and many other artists. On 17 or 18 October 1944 Viktor Ullmann was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.” For more, go [here] and [here] and [here] and [here] and [here].Courtesy: Orel Foundation

Great Advances in Science John Hopps is seen testing the world’s first pacemaker in this 1946 photo. Photo Credit : National Rese...

Yiddish Sites

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me at pjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel (“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;Committee For Yiddish, in Toronto, in partnership with UJA Federation, fosters and promotes Yiddish language and culture—indeed the entire Ashkenaz tradition—as a vibrant part of contemporary Jewish life and as a vital link between the Jewish past and future

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well as thousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

Forverts (“Forward”), one of the first mass Yiddish newspapers in America, founded in New York City in 1897;Jewish Folk Songs, by Batya Fonda, is a series of lectures given in either English or Hebrew about the ways folk songs reflect different themes of Jewish heritage;

Golden Age of Yiddish Radio, the 1930s to the 1950s, is brought to you by the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture in Miami, Florida.

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews, from Columbia University, consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

Yungtruf (“call to youth”), the site says, “cultivates the active use of the Yiddish language among today’s youth here and abroad by creating opportunities for Yiddish learning and immersion, and by providing resources and support for Yiddish speakers and families within an expansive social network”;